Electronic data communications between users, such as electronic mail (email), instant messaging (IM), short message service (SMS) and the like is increasingly popular. Often, users wish to communicate data items (i.e. files) to one another including images, video or audio clips, text or word processing documents, etc. However, some user devices such as handheld electronic devices (e.g. mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players, etc.) and particularly those communicating via wireless communication networks are more sensitive to resource limitations.
When developing software for such handheld devices, there are a number of limitations that may be taken into consideration in order to make handheld device operations fast and efficient. Limited memory resources, communication bandwidth, and battery power consumption is only a shortlist of issues handheld software developers have to think about.
One of the solutions to reducing resource consumption is to reduce the amount of data to be passed to and/or stored by the handheld device. For example, image files may undergo processing or conversion with a view to compressing the size of the image data. Often such treatment reduces a quality of the image. Also it demands image conversion every time the same image is sent/forwarded to a handheld device providing an extra load on the server executing the file processing. Another problem arises when an image that was specifically converted for a handheld device gets forwarded to a recipient (by e-mail, for example), who uses a desktop communication device: the reduced quality image arrives rather than the original image, although the recipient is capable of viewing a better quality image.
A solution that addresses one or more of these issues is therefore desired.